1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to methods, computer-based systems and computer program products for exchanging documents, and in particular documents retrieved from, or stored to, application service providers.
2. Discussion of the Background
An application service provider (ASP) is an entity, typically a company, that offers users remote access to software applications and related services that would otherwise have to be located on the user's local computer. For example, ASPs can provide searchable databases of legal, medical, financial, educational, scientific, or marketing documents to individuals and/or companies via the Internet. Alternatively, some companies may provide in-house type ASPs whereby shared software applications and services are located on a company computer accessible by the employees via a company network. Thus, as used herein, the term “ASP” has a broad meaning that includes a provider that allows a user to use an application not loaded on the user's local computer.
Today, there are a great number of ASPs providing various kinds of documents and services to a user. For example, one ASP may provide legal documents while another provides marketing, educational, scientific, financial, or medical documents. An example of a conventional network of ASPs connected to a user is shown in FIG. 1. As seen in FIG. 1, document ASPs 10, 20, 30, and 40 are connected to user 72 via the Internet 50. User 72 includes a personal computer (PC) 80, a printer 90, a local storage device 100 and a medium drive 110, and may be part of a home computer system, for example. In this example, user 72 independently connects to one of the ASPs 10–40 which provides the documents and services needed by the user 72. For example, the user 72 may connect to ASP 30 via the Internet 50 and download documents for viewing on the screen of the PC 80, printing with printer 90, or storing in the local storage device 100 and/or medium drive 110. Where different services are required, the user 72 may have to access a different ASP.
In the conventional system of FIG. 1, the user 72 must search the Internet 50 for the ASP pertaining to the subject matter and services needed by the user 72. While users of ASPs may be knowledgeable professionals such as attorneys and doctors, they may have limited experience and knowledge in searching for and selecting the ASP to meet their needs. Moreover, once the user selects an ASP, the ASP may not be compatible with the user 72. For example the interface environment, such as a graphical user interface, may be unfamiliar or unrecognizable to the user, and documents provided by the ASP may be in a format unrecognizable to the user 72. In this regard, user 72 may have particular difficulty in using multiple ASPs such as the ASPs 10–40. Even, where the user 72 is compatible with many ASPs, accessing and searching the ASPs individually is time consuming and costly due to different procedures and features associated with each ASP 10–40.
One common use of ASPs is for storing and retrieving documents. For example, user 72 may want to store business documents as electronic files in an ASP to save physical and electronic storage space local to the user 72. These business documents can be retrieved by the user 72 by accessing the storage ASP at any time. Moreover, user 72 can obtain large documents such as reference documents and books from a document retrieval ASP as needed. These storage and retrieval ASP services create a further problem in that voluminous documents must be transmitted between the user 72 and the ASP 10–40 via the user's network connection which has a limited data transfer capacity. This may lead to the communication line between the user 72 and the ASP 10–40 being busy during extended transmission period times.